I am the Secretary of the Symonds Yats Rapids Preservation Group and need the following message circulated as widely as possible:

The closure which has run from Sept 1st is being disregarded by some paddlers. This may have been due to high river levels lulling them into believing that work was not taking place and so ignoring the Navigation closed notices.

The work window closes on October 15th so the contractors will be working flatout to get the job done in the time available.
They will have at least two 26t 360 machines, and a tracked dumper in the river for the next 3 weeks. These machines are very large, their tracks are almost 2m high and they cannot get out of the way of paddlers attempting to transit the site to avoid a portage.

A brief message summarising our concerns might be;

'the rapids will have large machinery in across the whole weekend period (Sat 27th Sept and Sun 28th Sept) and anybody running the rapids will be seriously jeopardising the works as well as themselves. The rapids are a construction site and should be treated no differently to a conventional construction site'.

I have updated our website with the above information as well as photographs of the work in progress, see my profile for the link.

It has taken 12 years of hard slog to get to where we are now but it is not much longer now - please bear with us... and if you can make a donation to help pay for what we are doing and our running costs going forward via the paypal link at the bottom of our homepage we would be most grateful!

Secretary of the Symonds Yat Rapids Preservation Group
and member of Cheltenham Canoe Club